At hand, spread on the bent-grass to dry, and brown as seaweed itself, lie miles of fishing-nets, with their rows of worn cork floats; for the herring fishery of the season is over, the west coast boats have gone home through the Canal, and the gear is being laid by for the winter. In the end of April it will be wanted again for the Loch Fyne fishing, but it will be the end of June before the herring nets are used on the east coast again. The good woman coming up the shore below with her creel and pail of bait--mussels, sand-worms, and silver-gleaming needle-fish--is going now to bait for the later white-fishing the “long lines,” with their hundreds of hooks, which her husband and his sons will take out to set before daylight. To-morrow morning, when the boat comes home, she will have to fill her creel with the haddocks, and sell them along the country-side; or perhaps the fish will be bought at auction by the curers, to be smoked with the smoke of fragrant fir-cones into succulent, appetising “speldings.” The quay-head in the morning, when the fish auction is going on, makes a characteristic sight, and displays the only occasion on which anything like business wakens in the quiet place. The boats have come in with the running tide, and lie moored to great iron rings in the landing-place. Curious names they have, mostly double--the “Elspat and Ann,” or the “Ann and Margaret”--probably to represent the wives or sweethearts of two partners. In the boats themselves lie together heaps of lines, ropes, and sails, with fish gleaming here and there among them; while the quay is littered with oars and spars and cables, enough to make walking a fine art. The fish have been lifted out of each boat by its crew, and when the women have divided them into glittering heaps--a heap for each man and one for the boat--the skipper sells the boat’s heap, and its price settles that of the others. Here the shrewd bargaining power of the fisher-folk comes out, trained, as it is, by the narrow path they tread between means and ends; while here the women who have no man’s hand to bring them home the harvest of the deep contrive to find their bread by buying the fish they will afterwards retail. The whole transaction is primitive in the extreme, but one that sufficiently serves its purpose. A life of which this is the busiest scene may appear monotonous to the dweller in cities, but again and again there come hours of stern excitement which prove the manhood of the race. There have been times when every boat of the fishing fleet as it came rushing ashore had to be caught, at peril of life and limb, breast-deep in the furious surf, and landed safely with its occupants. Yet men are ever most plentiful when the work is most dangerous, and never yet has the lifeboat lacked a crew.